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Hello MSTM World!

Stay hungry, stay foolish. Those were the closing words of Steve Jobs Speech at the Commencement ceremony at Stanford in 2005, and are the opening words for this blog.

Being hungry, curious and foolish will lead us to the best achievements of our lives. We are new students of MS Technology and Management program, and we are hungry! We came here, to one of the best schools and one of the most unique programs in the US to satisfy our hunger for learning. And I, just one of them, can say that for all.

We have started as people from different backgrounds, who just arrived to the US, with no or little knowledge about the country, its customs, its traditions and culture. Most of us only heard about how it is in the US and some didn’t.

Therefore, the first week of workshops was helpful. It was definitely a positive experience in terms of the adaptation and transition into the working mindset. I heard the brains that already forgot what pace they were working in times of college squeaking from thinking about the economics and statistics problems. We had to work together; we slowly started to become a group of friends, a team…

Could you ever brag about being able to make 50 friends in one week? Well, I can, and I am very happy about it. Every day after being back home and having time on my own to think about everything that was happening during the day, I felt nothing but excitement. HUNGER! I was ready to go further, I was ready to learn more, I was ready to be foolish and have the best fun of my life with people that I could already call friends!

It all continued with the REAL CLASSES. Organizational Behavior, Quantitative Analysis of Decisions, Accounting, Frontiers in Technology – seems like we had a good start on what a manager is supposed to know to be a great leader. Sitting in class is the best time for us to learn. We are all curious; I have never heard so many questions asked, so many comments made, so much laughter and so many sparkles in the eyes of students in any other classes I took.

Team work – that’s the motto of MSTM and the red line that goes through every activity and every homework that we will be assigned. We got to realize what it actually means when we went to a field trip to Monticello, Illinois, just 30 minutes away from Champaign. Guess what we were doing? Yes, team building, but how? Can you find a team aspect in 16 people of various sizes standing on a single 4x4 square foot pedestal? We learned that when coming up with a well-thought strategy, all together, we were able to do it. Go team! Have you ever thought that you could overcome a 2.5 meter wall without a rope, or any other equipment? With a team that throws you up and catches you at the top, you can! Go team!

That is the amazing beginning that we had... the beginning of new lives of each of us. It is never going to be the same again. It is only going to be better!